People, you can personalize your
personal canon however you like; in my personal canon for instance, "House of M" is just a fancy name for a martini. But in a full-out forum discussion about the character as depicted in canon, one should possibly have a better reason for outright ignoring certain stories than "Well, I think they did it badly."
BrianWilly, you're a Joss Whedon fan, so you've probably read the two issues of Runaways Joss has written so far. Tell me, is it sane to fire a rocket launcher at a group of unarmed children, without warning, just because they are breaking into an unoccupied building, with the intent to steal?
Going by just this incident in itself, it was definitely very mean and naughty and wrong, but not really a clear sign of insanity as we know it. People can be morally bankrupt, do-whatever-it-takes evil bastards who've managed to convince themselves of the necessity of their shady ways without being outright insane to go along with it.
Joss was writing the Punisher as a villain, but I don't know that it was overtly insane. Though, yes, I definitely agree that it's a strong point in
favor of the insanity thing (one of many that he's accumulated throughout the years)...in favor of, but not one hundred percent indicative.
To be completely honest, I thought the Punisher's appearance in Runaways was a bit of poetic justice in a lot of ways; other character like Wolverine and Spider-Man almost always,
always get written off-character when they appear in Punisher's books -- and when I say "off-character," mostly I mean "like foaming ******s" -- just to make Frank seem that much more badass, so I'm frankly not quite as inclined to complain when the same happens to him when he appears in other books.
plays 
, 
, 
, & 
, like a bunch of chumps.
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